he traffic could not take
place. It was an instance of the largely unconscious way in which the
courts had been twisted into the exaltation of property rights over
human rights, and the subordination of the welfare of the laborer when
compared with the profit of the man for whom he labored. By what I fear
my conservative friends regarded as frightfully aggressive missionary
work, which included some uncommonly plain speaking as to certain unjust
and anti-social judicial decisions, we succeeded in largely, but by no
means altogether, correcting this view, at least so far as the best and
most enlightened judges were concerned.

Very much the most important action I took as regards labor had nothing
to do with legislation, and represented executive action which was not
required by the Constitution. It illustrated as well as anything that
I did the theory which I have called the Jackson-Lincoln theory of the
Presidency; that is, that occasionally great national crises arise which
call for immediate and vigorous executive action, and that in such cases
it is the duty of the President to act upon the theory that he is the
steward of the people, and that the proper attitude for him to take is
that he is bound to assume that he has the legal right to do whatever
the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws
explicitly forbid him to do it.

Early in the spring of 1902 a universal strike began in the anthracite
regions. The miners and the operators became deeply embittered, and the
strike went on throughout the summer and the early fall without any sign
of reaching an end, and with almost complete stoppage of mining. In many
cities, especially in the East, the heating apparatus is designed
for anthracite, so that the bituminous coal is only a very partial
substitute. Moreover, in many regions, even in farmhouses, many of the
provisions are for burning coal and not wood. In consequence, the coal
famine became a National menace as the winter approached. In most big
cities and many farming districts east of the Mississippi the shortage
of anthracite threatened calamity. In the populous industrial States,
from Ohio eastward, it was not merely calamity, but the direct disaster,
that was threatened. Ordinarily conservative men, men very sensitive as
to the rights of property under normal conditions, when faced by this
crisis felt, quite rightly, that there must be some radical action. The
Governor of Massachusett